


Coeur Brisé

by HannahLydia



Series: Constants and Variables - Vignettes [5]
Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Paris, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Angst, F/M, Implied Masturbation, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Incest, PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 02:18:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15962582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HannahLydia/pseuds/HannahLydia
Summary: Elizabeth and Booker have made it to Paris, but it's not the fix-all happy ending they imagined. Trauma and guilt are proving too much for them and tonight, just like most nights, Booker can't sleep.





	Coeur Brisé

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bookerbeth Week '17, for the prompt "Wounds". I very rarely write fics and drabbles in present tense but it seemed to flow nicely for this one.

Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night.  
Booker steps through their apartment, heads for the kitchen, fixes himself a drink, and lets the dark wrap itself around him. He’ll remember that he promised himself he wouldn’t touch another bottle in Paris, but he reasons that he promised too much. Alcohol is familiar, dependable. A devil, but a devil he knows.

He might sit on the balcony, with the net curtains undulating in the evening breeze, wearing nothing more than his union suit. He’ll have an ashtray, a box of matches and a packet of cigarettes, but sometimes he’ll do no more than light a match, staring at it. Sometimes the drinking is enough. 

Most nights she cries.  
He’ll sit and listen, sometimes drinking himself into a stupor, sometimes letting her tears cut him like glass. It’s cathartic, he thinks, but in truth, it’s self-destructive. 

Part of him always wonders if she cries because of him. Logic tells him it’s really the stress of Columbia and Rapture combined; he’s lived it with her, of course, but he’s also lived it before. He remembers being seventeen, being eighteen, and being so hate-filled and hurt and broken, unable to cry because he didn’t know how to, so burying himself in vices instead. That’s how it started, of course - the drinking, the fighting, the gambling. He remembers hitting out until his knuckles were bloody and his reputation was soured, and all because he didn’t know how to cry.  
Still, part of him can’t help but wonder.

When he drinks, his tears come too. Unlike Elizabeth’s, his are burning and angry and do nothing to ease the pain. Sometimes he’ll take the lit match and press it to his scarred hand, as if exacting punishment for his sins. He’ll hiss, he’ll curse and he’ll cry, taking it because he believes he deserves it, then the drink will win and he’ll pass out in the chair until morning. 

When he doesn’t drink, he wants to go to her.  
He imagines one night that he will knock on her door and open it, regardless of invitation. He thinks that he will sit on her bed and pull her into his arms, and he will hold her until the tears cease. He’ll tell her that everything will be all right, because it will, because it has to be, because they’re together.

He knows better. He doesn’t trust himself to do those things, because he doesn’t trust himself to do or say the right thing around her. 

He loves her.  
He loves her far more than he should, far more than is pertinent. 

Some nights he doesn’t even make it to the balcony, because he doesn’t make it out of his bed. The tears will burn at the corners of his eyes, and he will listen to her cry, and whimper and beg some being that’s greater than she, and he’ll wonder if she’s touching herself and thinking of him. 

Despite it all, they’re living separate lives.  
They’re not a family as they should be, and they’re not the couple they perhaps want to be; they’re a mockery of something in-between, and whatever it is is destroying them both. 

He wants to tell her how he feels, but he doubts; doesn’t even know if she feels the same.  
Sometimes he pretends he feels nothing at all, because it’s easier, because it helps. 

He has so much to lose.  
He doesn’t think he can live through losing her again.


End file.
